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Swimming at Midnight
John Matthias
其他書名
Selected Shorter Poems
出版
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press
, 1995
主題
Poetry / General
Poetry / American / General
ISBN
0804009848
9780804009843
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=IxFbAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋
Swimming at Midnight
collects the short and middle-length poems from John Matthias's earlier books together with twenty poems that have previously appeared only in magazines. It is published simultaneously with
Beltane at Aphelion
, which includes all of Matthias's longer poems. The two books together represent some thirty years of his work.
The poems in
Swimming at Midnight
range from early lyrics written in American during the late 1960s to meditative poems dealing with historical, geographical and cultural themes deriving from Matthias's years in England in the seventies and eighties; they include the epistolary poems from
Turns
, "Poem for Cynouai" from
Crossing
, "A Wind in Roussillon" from
Northern Summer
, and the formal experiments engaging issues of poetics and metaphysics for which Matthias is well known. The book concludes with a section of new poems and translations dealing both with the public world of modern history and the private experience of life in the century's final decade. The last poem of all connects the work in
Swimming at Midnight
with the last of the long poems in
Beltane at Aphelion
.
Critics have been warm in their praise of Matthias's work. Robert Duncan called his early poetry "the work of a Goliard--one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time," and Guy Davenport has said that his recent work makes him "one of the leading poets in the USA." D. M. Thomas in the
TLS
admired the "virtuosity" of
Turns
and the way "life presses into the poems," while John Fuller in the same journal found the poems in
Crossing
"bursting with a masterful intelligence." In a long essay on
Northern Summer
, Jeremy Hooker wrote: "In his combination of lyrical and discursive voices, as in subject and concern, Matthias has an exciting range...He writes in some poems from a tension between a scribe's respect for the integrity of his materials and a magician's freedom to transform them, and in many poems he brings together the contrasting gifts and is fully present as himself, both scribe and magician."